pokerstars.es gonna take a pretty big hit the next few weeks - winamax launched in spain , hopefully this will force them to revert some of these terrible changes .

That sounds amazing!

Still in for more Hyper PKOs !

Btw payout changes do suck hard but after couple of years you get used to having 99% bad changes.
For that reason I do play on plenty of other sites just because.

Yup. Replacing the $27 hyper 3-stack with PKO same buy-in would be good. That format is less popular than the regular freeze-outs.

These numbers mean nothing if this new mtt just feeds of the BB11 which starts 5 minutes later. You have to look at the whole picture and not just at the mtts you prefer.

It's not binary, there are players playing that will be happy to add that tournament and there are players not playing that will because of that tournament. It's not as simple as "tournament yxz added, stopped playing tournament xyz" otherwise Stars' hefty schedule would never survive.

Besides, you can probably scrap other tournaments, there is a huge redundancy in the schedule with certain types of tournaments. The same cannot be said for PKO zooms and specifically HU PKO zooms where in the $10+ range you only have 4 you can play in 12 hours.

Agreed, where do you guys think would be the perfect spot for blinds? 3 minutes would essentially play as a regular (8-10 minute) due to being able to play 2.5-4 hands per minute, but would finish as quickly as other hypers would. I think they can experiment with 2-3 minutes, but I would personally prefer in the 3 minute range.

Some small ones here and there would be nice (small fields that is).

Where are the mega sats for the Barcelona National and Main Event? There were some 20/50 seat ones last year. This year I haven't seen anything above 5 seats on a Sunday? What's going on?

Stars hefty schedule is not surviving. Numbers have been dropping consistently for years, guarantees slashed, re-entry on every mtts

For good reason, they are making negative changes, what I said was within the context of what he said.

But simultaneously, not surviving relative to who? 888, Party, Global??? As far as I'm aware online poker has been growing as of late

https://www.pokernews.com/news/2017/...h-q3-29440.htm

And this is despite not having the US online which obviously hurts a ton and Stars' obviously negative changes.

You're making a big jump from MTT schedule to revenue of the poker operators; think about cash and live games for example. The guarantees of the MTT schedule on stars have been reduced from what I can tell.

The problem is that these revenue numbers are pretty useless on its own. You would have to look at net deposits/games played etc. to make an argument for a boom. If the increase in revenue is just a result of players playing more high-rake/low ev games then its pretty far-fetched to call it a boom. Ofc from a business standpoint its seems the right direction but if you kill vanilla poker in the process it would be disaster. In the end you end up as an pure gambling site and the fight for poker being recognized as a skillgame was for naught.

Isn't pokernews owned by pokerstars? I'm not saying the article is wrong, but it's super easy to fondle with data and if they're not independent they have incentive to make things look a certain way.

According to this https://calvinayre.com/2017/10/31/po...ity-pokernews/ that's right. I remember them selling rake increase as a positive thing so it was clear then.

Big $11 now has a 20k guarantee!!!!????? wow that is a fckn disgrace

It didn't happen overnight mate it took a few years of solid work.

Just getting back in mtts, my god stars are going downhill rapid the changes for the players benefit
• chests (awful)
•payout changes (awful)
•rake increases (awful)

there’s not enough running on other sites atm, to completely fill a schedule for me Let’s just hope run it once steps up to the plate then I won’t have to darken stars door again

The article cite numbers from a news article that I wrote and from data we compile. The information comes from public company statements so is accurate to the best of anyone's knowledge. Among public companies, online poker revenue grew in 2017 and into Q1 2018.

PokerStars should create a daily tournament Series for micro/low stakes "grinders" with proper structures, proper payouts, small guarantees (to start). Give them a different color and run like a Series of 12 per day from 9 AM to 7 PM (with a couple extra in the heart of prime time). Not every event has to be vanilla, can be a mix of the main formats (8max and 6max, standard PKO, Deep 8max and the last couple events would be Deep Turbos)...

The main event should be like an $11, 10K... the rest should be around 2.5K-7.5K and be $3.30, $5.50, $7.50 and $11 (you can keep the rake changes in, of course).

But the events should be 12-15% payouts... proper final table payouts with 2nd getting 75%-80% of 1st and so on...

You can even call it the PokerStars Daily Grinder Series to further scare away Recs from joining...

I mean you claim to be "testing" stuff all the time, but it's always horrible changes for Regs... but a test implies you have data from the "other" side to compare to and Stars hasn't run a straight proper tourney (a grinder version of proper) in years, so how would they know how well they would do?

You don't take out any of your current offerings, so you're merely ADDING rake generation for Stars with this test and you, at worst, service a group of players clamoring for something to remind them of the old days structure and payout wise and you might even segregate your pool further by having recs skipping these events and regs skipping the non-Grinder events and battling each other, which would be a win-win for Stars current goals.

Never going to happen, but if the tourneys bombed completely and nobody wanted to play them, you'd have all the evidence you need to shut everyone in here up that the changes you're making are the reason for declining performance and instead we can just blame a naturally declining ecosystem for the reason you've had to make changes.

If it works, then Stars gets to be the leader in a movement back toward "real" poker again.

Revenue has nothing to do with traffic. Traffic is dropping (at least in MTTs) which you can see from guarantees.

There aren't that many regs at those stakes for 1K runners daily. You can't live of the profit you can make at those stakes in most of the world, so how is someone gonna grind those tournaments daily?

LOL... who said anything about making a living? I was referring to his "tests." Stars is constantly running "tests" of changes that take poker further away from it's roots.

The claim by Stars is essentially regs win rates are ruining micro/low stakes poker and they are constantly testing stuff to lower them. In here, it is the claim of everyone that this is causing decreased traffic overall, which is bad for Stars long term.

So you've already got the "tests" running for the bad changes... but in order to be scientific you need a comparison point. Run a series of old school tourneys during the day at these limits along side, give them moderate guarantees and proper structures/payouts and promote them as "grinder" events, meaning promote that as being "classic poker tournaments" and see if they become reg infested bowls that go nowhere or if perhaps the players here are right and even recs would rather play a good tourney than some joke flat playout, horrible final table payout, odd structured event.

It's a real test... one that offers both sides up and let's one side win or lose and then you move forward based on the results.

And lots of people can earn enough money to live on in certain countries playing $3 - $11 tourneys... not getting rich, but living on? Sure.

But as I said, it's not about that, it's about getting Luke to stop saying every bad change is a "test" when in reality it's just them slowly, sneakily trying to get bad changes into the software with the least amount of noise or backlash.

Amen

Please tell me this is a joke.

Rip the last few cash game pros on stars

Luke, do you know why Fortnite became the most popular game of all time?

Because they are close to their community and make changes which the community suggests instead of melting them.

I can tell you by now that PokerStars wont be the market leader anymore in a few years for sure.


Something like this -> http://puu.sh/AWdnZ/263806acd8.png & this https://puu.sh/AWdsz/0f914a4dd6.png is unaccaptable.

I mean how do you even think that something like this would ever work?

Of course people will lose money slower, but their final table experience will be a lot worse as well.
A lot of people play till they reach a final table in a tournament and do you really want them to have the experience of only getting like 12-20 Buy-Ins for making a final table of a 2.5k players field?
The main reason why most of the players even play tournaments is not to double their money or tripple it, its because of the chance of reaching an FT + having a guaranteed big payout.

This change is even worse than the rake increase tbh.

I removed a lot of those tournaments from the list of tournaments I would play. Instead I added more tournamnets from Winamax & Party. I dont see any reason to continue playing those on Stars anymore.

The next step is banning regs to protect recreationals?